I SEE YOU - Gregg Hurwitz

It's hard to read I SEE YOU and not care.  About Drew - waking up from anaesthetic to discover he'd had this growth in his brain, a growth that just may be the reason why he killed the woman he once loved.  But he doesn't remember anything...  yet.  About Junior, the wisecracking, hard boy, graffiti artist who probably saw a killer dump his second victim.  Junior's not as hard as he wants people to think he is.  About Lloyd whose wife is dying a drawn out, painful slow death.  About Caroline, whose horrific injuries obscure who she really is.  

Drew Danner is a novelist - he writes crime thrillers.  But nothing in his fictional imagination has ever given him a plot like the one that his life degenerates into after the death of his ex-fiancee.  Despite being the number one prime suspect, Drew's brain tumour casts enough doubt and he's free.  The second killing of a woman, with a crime scene containing his DNA convinces Drew that somebody is trying very hard to set him up for a murder charge - and despite a video that conclusively shows he was somewhere else when this second woman dies, the local cops aren't so convinced that he's being set up at all.

Not everybody in I SEE YOU is damaged though, Drew has friends with a happy (albeit somewhat crowded by children) home life - a haven from the frenetic pace of Drew's life, but in a strange way they also reflect how disconnected, lonely his existence really is.  Junior, the young boy who was a witness to the car that dumped the second victim, is a neglected and damaged kid who serves as a perfect counterpart to Drew's self-involvement.  And Xena - Junior's dog - dragged into Drew's home and life to stop her from being put down because there was nowhere for her to go - is a character in her own right.  I just wish somebody had explained to someone that you have to feed a dog - I spent most of the later part of the book seriously obsessed with when somebody was going to give that dog a decent meal!

There are some wonderful digs at shallow LA life, including a particularly hilarious serving late in the book that would make it worth reading for alone, not that the rest of the book wasn't worth reading mind you.  There's also a lot of descriptive detail about the landscape and the people but this doesn't slow the pace, which is typically thriller styled - moving the story along rapidly, but not sacrificing character development to the point where you don't care about these people.  

A final twist at the end which really worked and I SEE YOU lived up to the "Pure nail-biting, stay-up-all-night suspense" it was billed as.